Radio 1Weekly (with occasional absences — see below), June
to December 1994. Probably 24 shows in total

A ‘dangerous’, cutting-edge comedy show which, for once,
entirely lived up to its hype. The Chris Morris Music Show
was, quite genuinely, an outrageous, sick, twisted programme which constantly
put its own existence in jeopardy. It was also — for those prepared
to tolerate its approach — virulently funny.

The decision to grant the comedian Christopher Morris
a regular, hour-long comedy and music show followed the great success of
BBC2’s The Day Today (early 1994), the television adaptation of
Radio 4’s On The Hour. Morris had
fronted both of these shows and was by this stage a recognisable figure.
But, although these series were strongly imbued with his unique presentational
style, and contained deliberate hoax features and the occasional controversial
item, they actually represented the comedian at his most restrained.
A quick glance through the Chris Morris track record of work at various
student and local radio stations would have revealed the dominating presence
of the word ‘sacked’. There is a proliferation of stories and legends
concerning Morris’s early career: his misdemeanours apparently include
filling news studios with helium during the broadcast of serious bulletins
and making one or two subtle emendations to a tape of the Queen’s Speech.
He had apparently been contracted to present a Radio 1 series once before,
beginning with a two-hour special on Christmas Day 1990; a carefully-constructed
Myra Hindley joke transmitted on the early-evening programme secured his
instant dismissal.

The Radio 1 executives who commissioned the new series
must have been aware of all this when they approached the man who was now
a rising young telly comedian; in interviews around the time the show first
aired, Morris himself suggested that the practicalities of the situation
would probably force some sense of restraint upon him. But
this was not to be: in The Chris Morris Music Show, the listening
public got its first real taste of the full-on Chris Morris aural assault.

As the name suggests, the Music Show contained
song tracks, which (as in every other Radio 1 comedy from this period)
were interspersed between the comedy items. Morris chose and introduced
all the tunes himself: although the show was a Light Ent production he
was happy to be represented, in contrast to the station’s other comedy
stars, more as a kind of twisted DJ than as a straightforward comedy presenter,
and this role was reinforced by the show’s scheduling (it was granted a
permanent Wednesday night slot for the whole of its seven-month run; the
equivalent Monday-night slot at this time housed more traditional comedy
shows which were transmitted as series of four to eight episodes).
Morris succeeded in making the music an integral part of the show, embellishing
it in his own inimitable style (inserting obscure samples, playing along
over the top with a variety of ill-tuned instruments, indulging his talent
for pastiche, and broadcasting exceptionally offensive ‘pop facts’ about
some of the artists involved which only fell outside the laws of libel
thanks to their obvious untruth). The music itself was a potential
source of controversy, owing to Morris’s predilection for gangsta rap and
his absent-minded tendency to play the wrong (non-radio-) edits of songs,
but the volume of flak drawn by the rest of the show prevented this from
becoming much of an issue.

The speech element also seemed to be influenced by the
format of a typical Radio 1-style DJ-driven show, consisting mainly of
monologues, phone-ins, interviews and studio discussions. Chris’s
regular collaborator on the show was Peter Baynham, the Day Today
co-writer also known for his work with Armando Iannucci and Lee and Herring.
In the show’s more restrained moments — which were still wildly surreal
and faintly disturbing — the two would have cosy, semi-scripted chats on
all manner of subjects (a typical episode involves Peter as a character
explaining new ways to obtain a ‘legal high’, which include smoking a spider-plant
through a saxophone filled with honey and inserting your head into a flesh
wound on the underside of a cow). Some of the phone-in quizzes (which
were pre-recorded, but in most cases entirely genuine) caused more trouble,
however: the ‘Sock Quiz’ was a thinly-veiled attempt to coerce young children
into pronouncing the word “fuck”.

Several elements first heard in On The Hour were
resurrected, including the report features in which Chris went out with
a roving microphone, asking ridiculous questions in silly voices and receiving
earnest replies from the public, and the gormless DJ character Wayne Carr
(voiced by Chris himself), now cast in the role of celebrity interviewer.
As in Morris’s later and even more incendiary work, the Channel 4 series
Brass Eye, bogus interviews with the rich and famous played a significant
part in the show, whether face-to-face or as a part of another regular
phone-in feature, ‘Call Peter Hammill’. Morris, or the character
he happened to be inhabiting at the time, would always do his best first
to confuse, and then to offend, the hapless interviewee, often with memorable
results. More generally, Morris was, like Radio 1’s original shock-tactics
comedian Victor Lewis Smith (with whom he actually
became involved in a priority dispute), a master of the wind-up phone-call,
greatly given to ringing up innocuous service providers or members of the
public and giving them a hard time.

Several shows in the series (mainly towards the beginning
of the run, for reasons which will become clear) featured some kind of
narrative progression, relating events that (supposedly) happened in and
around the studio in the course of the show. In one programme, the
hapless Peter Baynham was sent out to steal a baby; in another, Chris was
sent a tortoise to autograph and, with appropriate sound effects, removed
it from its shell (cue worried phone calls to several surprisingly ill-informed
vets, one of whom advised him to put the creature out of its misery by
leaving it in the freezer); in another still, Chris and Pete found the
corpse of DJ Johnnie Walker (Chris’s former radio-station boss) in a neighbouring
studio and telephoned a French taxidermist to ask if he would mind stuffing
it for an exhibition on the history of radio. All these episodes
drew complaints; the most notorious themed programme of all, however, was
the sixth show in the run, commonly referred to as “the Heseltine Death
Episode”.

This transmission quickly became, in the words of John
Peel, “famed in folksong and legend”. Many people have gained the
impression that Morris interrupted his show to broadcast a hoax announcement
that Michael Heseltine, the senior Conservative politician, had died following
a second heart attack. This is somewhat inaccurate: as the best-known
incident in Morris’s radio career, the transmission has attained a kind
of mythological status, with the result that many accounts given in the
media provide incorrect details (some even attributing the episode to On
The Hour rather than the Music Show). What Morris actually
did was more subtle, broadcasting at the start and end of the show a highly
ambiguous message: “This is BBC Radio 1FM, and if there is any news of
the death of Michael Heseltine in the next hour, we’ll let you know.”
Anybody actually listening to the show — which also included a discussion
with Bruce Foxton of the Jam as to which bassline might make a suitable
epitath for Heseltine, a hoax phone-call to the MP Jerry Hayes asking
him to provide a quote for a supposed Heseltine obituary being compiled
in advance, and a genuine news report making no mention of the ‘death’
— could not have been fooled by the announcement for more than about ten
minutes. (In all fairness, it should be pointed out that Morris later
went on to announce the death of Sir Jimmy Saville). Nonetheless,
the stunt was judged unacceptable by Morris’s superiors, and the show received
a two-week suspension.

The non-apppearance of episodes soon became something
of a regular occurrence. After the Heseltine episode Morris was no
longer allowed to present the show live (although, even in the early shows,
some of the features which were meant to sound ‘live’ had been prerecorded
anyway), and had to have each show cleared by the censors before it could
be transmitted. Pressure of time often meant that rejected shows
could not be re-edited, so repeats of earlier shows or other programmes
were substituted. Towards the end of the run, things got increasingly
chaotic as a result of rushed assembly, with noticeable effects on the
presentation quality of the shows. As the series closed, Morris claimed
to be clearing his shows with the censors and then secretly re-editing
the tapes prior to broadcast: the fact that he chose to make this claim
in the Radio Times billing for his own show (which was duly printed)
is as good a demonstration as any of the Morris mindset at work.

It would be churlish to conclude this article without
some mention of the man who, surely, has suffered more in the name of radio
comedy than anyone else in the world: one Paul Garner. Garner’s role
in the show was, basically, to go out and engage in stupefyingly childish
acts liable to jeapordise his personal safety, as instructed by Chris via
a mobile phone. There were three basic situations: in his first few
appearances, some of which were hence genuinely live, Paul would go into
a shop to buy something; he would then be directed to make some complaint
about his change. The complaints started off fairly surreal (“These
coins are too shiny…”) and got worse (“Say you can’t take the coin because
it’s got a Harris on it” ordered Chris, helpfully advising Paul to “point
at the Harris”). When the ‘shop-bothering’ routine became stale,
the duo turned their attention towards Heathrow Airport, with Garner requesting
messages to be read out over the tannoy asking fictitious individuals with
with amusing or obscene names to contact the Information Office.
It was soon established that any vaguely foreign-sounding collection of
syllables would be read out, leading to paired phrases (“Avjezbhin Fayed
and Babaiev Rjiboadi”) and ultimately entire sentences which became increasingly
obvious: on one of the last shows, travellers at the airport can be heard
hooting with laughter as the names are read out, and Garner was ultimately
found out and forced to switch operations to Gatwick. All of which
pales into insignificance beside the third set-up, in which Paul would
be sent into a hotel lobby to abuse a randomly-selected passer-by (“Tell
him he has to leave the building because he’s the wrong shape”): this routine
tended to bring the adrenalin-crazed Garner within an inch of suffering
serious physical violence.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Music Show was not cancelled
before reaching the end of the run originally agreed, and culminated (ironically
enough) in a two-hour Christmas special made up largely of series highlights.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Radio 1 did not commission any more of the same
— although, intriguingly, it has since retained Mr Morris’s services (in
the form of Blue Jam, a show which also
mixes comedy and music but in a radically different style) while dropping
all other comedy shows from its schedules. Morris’s passion for confrontation,
meanwhile, has since been expressed even more explosively in Channel 4’s
1997 mock-documentary Brass Eye, the last transmission of which
included an obscene subliminal message concerning the station’s then controller
Michael Grade, inserted by Morris at the last possible moment.

External links: Glebe’s
Thrift Funnel, featuring a wealth of Morris-related materialThe Rethink
site (“Christ’s Fat Cock!”), covering similar ground and with numerous
samples from the show here,
plus probably the most comprehensive links
page to other relevant pagesA full set of summaries
of the contents of each Music Show[Editor’s note: the compiler of this last item is
a noted frank sidebottom fan and as such beyond reproach]